standing up to pee in the ladies' room

Chuck Colson on trans-gendered bathrooms (hat tip: Linda Christiansen)...

I'd think there'd be bigger fish for Colson to fry, but this is certainly odd and interesting. (And what does Colson think about male and female homosexuals who have access to these bathrooms?)

As an economist, it gets me wondering why we have "public" bathrooms anyway. Why is this a role for government?

Or if we mean privately-owned bathrooms in relatively-public place, then the easiest solution would be that the owners would have stronger property rights over "their" bathrooms.

I wonder if Harry Blackmun would have found a Constitutional right to privacy in the bathroom...

Last week, Colorado's legislature passed—and Gov. Bill Ritter signed—a law that will open all public accommodations, including public restrooms, to anyone who wants to use them. That means men may use a women's restroom, and women may enter men's rooms. The rationale for Senate Bill 200 is that transgenders should be able to use the restroom they feel most comfortable using. Apparently, it is not important if others feel uncomfortable having their privacy violated every time they use public facilities.

The lack of privacy is not the only problem. Nobody is going to ask a man if he is trangendered before allowing him into the ladies' room. This means any man—including a child molester—could simply follow a little girl into the privacy of a public restroom. And, if a man decided to expose himself to a young girl there, who is she going to complain to? After all, restrooms, by definition, are places where one exposes the private parts of one's body....

Appalling as this law is, it gets worse. Tom Minnery of Focus on the Family points out, in the Denver Post, that the law also threatens religious liberty: Colorado's "public accommodations" law includes not only hotels and restaurants, but also any small or home-based business that offers "goods or services" to the public...

In a free country, nobody has the right to tell us what to believe—or to punish us for putting our First Amendment rights into practice. And, yes, there are men and women who deserve privacy, no matter who tells us there are no differences between the sexes.